Polity, Practice, and the Mission of The United Methodist Church: 2006 Edition

By Thomas E. Frank

"Commissioned by the General Board of Higher Education and Ministry for use in United Methodist doctrine/polity/history courses." This in-depth analysis of the connection between United Methodist polity and theology addresses ways in which historical developments have shaped--and continue to shape--the organization of the church.This revised edition incorporates the actions of The United Methodist General Conference, 2004. The book discusses continuing reforms of the church's plan for baptism and church membership, as well as the emergence of deacon's orders and other changes to ordained ministry procedures. The text is now cross-referenced to the Book of Discipline, 2004, including the revised order of disciplinary chapters and paragraph numbering. Denominational statistics are updated, along with references to recent works on The United Methodist Church and American religious life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abingdon Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9781426763571

Thomas E. Frank

Thomas Edward Frank is University Professor at Wake Forest University.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

The Rhetoric of Crisis and United Methodist Polity

Mainstream Protestantism in the United States is in crisis. If you did not already think so, surely you would after reading books not only about The United Methodist Church but also about other denominations—such as the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Episcopal Church, United Church of Christ, or Presbyterian Church (USA)¹—or listening to speeches at church conferences, or perusing articles in newsletters and periodicals.

• The church is in disastrous decline, commentators agree. The ice cube is melting and without dramatic changes in assumptions about what congregations should be like and what services denominations should provide, the future of United Methodism and other established groups is at risk.²

• Laity are disillusioned. Many members have not learned even the basics of our church’s history and teachings. Clergy are demoralized. Our leaders are afraid to lead, or do not know how to lead in the way churches need today, or are rewarded by a dysfunctional system for not leading.

• It’s time for new paradigms of organization. The days of bloated bureaucracy and top-down programming are over. This is the era of local initiative and control, modeled by the next church of independent congregations numbering in the thousands and offering a full range of religious and social services for their constituents.

• Denominations are so badly divided over homosexuality—along with other gender, sexuality, and family issues—that there is little choice but amicable separation or some kind of exit fee to enable like-minded congregations to leave the current denomination and form their own associations.³

The church is immersed, in short, in a rhetoric of crisis. So pervasive is this manner of speech that no speaker at a pastors’ school or conference would dare omit a litany of ills or fail to promise a coming revolution.⁴ The recitation of alarming statistics and their reduction to tabloid headlines seems to get everyone’s attention. A speaker who can persuade a church audience of their impending doom will be talked about for years, and maybe even touted for the episcopacy.

I have chosen this time in history to write and regularly update a book on United Methodist polity. My colleagues and friends think I’m crazy to take on such a topic. Even I have joined in the sarcasm about the project, telling friends that I’m writing a book about how the church works—it’s going to be a novel.

Indeed I must begin by making clear that I recognize that the polity I describe and interpret here continues to be modified while the book is in circulation. Yet I hope that the perspective from which I write will be of some enduring value. In particular, I conceive of my task in what I consider an entirely different frame of reference from many commentators on U.S. mainstream Protestantism in general, and United Methodism in particular.

A Rhetoric of Power

I first began to speak and write about United Methodism less than twenty years ago, when a shift from nine years of pastoring to full-time teaching gave me more time to focus my thoughts. At first I joined fully in the rhetoric of crisis. I found that it gave me entree to audiences; listeners would become very intent as I described the denomination’s problems. If I could put the right statistics together, I would have them gasping in horror. I could then dazzle them with metaphors for how the church ought to look in the future.

I began to get uneasy about my zealous viewpoint for three reasons. For one thing I found myself part of a cadre of interpreters who were touring the denomination saying things that seemed to procure more and more invitations to say more and more potent and decisive things. I began to realize that the rhetoric of crisis is a rhetoric of power. It gives power to the speaker who can manipulate the data; it ascribes power to distant experts who have organizational and religious knowledge that the laity lack; it conveys power to groups who have a plan or program for (what they call) change.

Conversely, the rhetoric of crisis takes power away from laity and pastors by diminishing the significance of their work—they who meet week after week in sanctuaries all across the landscape to worship God, pray for guidance, and struggle to raise the money and rally the volunteers to carry out their ministries. The rhetoric of crisis makes judicatory officers, conference lay leaders, and others who are charged with connectional work look lazy and uninformed or worse, pathetic.

Second, I began to understand how the rhetoric of crisis profoundly serves U.S. culture’s idol of success. An obsession with declining numbers and loss of influence is the mirror image of a compulsion for growing numbers and increasing influence and notoriety. In the U.S. bigger is better or more attention-grabbing no matter what the product or effect of the bigness. The public thrills to stories of hamburger empires without asking questions about where the beef is raised. People are glued to their televisions to see who won the biggest state lottery pot in history, but few seem to wonder who is buying all the tickets and at what price to their families.

By this way of thinking in the church, only a congregation with thousands of members, crowded with upwardly mobile (subtext: white or at the very least, professional black) people, is considered a success worth talking about. No one goes to a small church to study methods of attracting new members or getting people involved. A church flourishing in a poor neighborhood, or a growing church that conducts services in a language other than English, or a congregation of a hundred members that works tirelessly to respond to needs in its community, cannot count as a sign of vitality in the denomination.

The choice of numerical decline and institutional crisis as the central issue for discussion is itself an exercise of power. It draws attention and energy away from the pressing concerns of the communities in which congregations minister. It preoccupies conferences and conversations with talk of success or failure instead of such persistent issues as gender, racial, or economic justice, which must be resolved in the church if we expect them to be resolved anywhere in the human community.

Worse, the rhetoric of crisis distracts the church from the gospel it has been entrusted with proclaiming. It focuses on the institution instead of the message the institution represents to the world. A church that talks constantly about its loss of members, tells nostalgic stories about how wonderful everything used to be, continually scolds its pastors and laity for not being more productive, and harangues people about finding a vision for the future is focusing on itself and its own compulsive needs. A church that announces the good news of Jesus Christ, identifies with the poor, cares for the brokenhearted, welcomes the stranger, pours money and volunteers into places of crisis, acts for justice, and pleads for the beauty and integrity of God’s good creation is being true to its calling. And it is God who gives the increase when the church is thus faithful.

Change as Loss

My discomfort with the power of words to disrupt, to hurt, or subtly to rearrange and appeal to organizational power and social status was accompanied by a third realization. The rhetoric of crisis was blinding me and other commentators to a realistic assessment of denominational trends and the emerging outlines and possibilities of a church of the future.

For the past thirty years many mainstream Protestant scholars and leaders have been preoccupied with decline. Having begun their professional work in the denominations in the 1950s and 1960s, they tended to view the period since 1970 as an era of failure, fragmentation, and loss. Many of the flagship churches of their youth had a remnant of their previous membership. Nationally known figures in preaching and scholarship retired or died and were not replaced by equally well-known leaders. Denominational units for mission, education, or other connectional causes were under severe financial duress. Many church-related institutions approved new charters diminishing or deleting their church affiliation and continuing with self-perpetuating boards of trustees.

A brief review of membership data also seemed to confirm a paradigm of loss, though how precisely to account for the trends has been hotly disputed. The five largest denominations generally considered the core group of mainstream Protestantism (listed above) all reported their highest membership totals around 1965. From then until the end of the 1980s, the Presbyterians reported losses of a third of their membership, the Episcopalians almost 30 percent, and the Disciples astonishingly close to half.

United Methodism in the U.S. peaked at over 11 million members, and in 2002 reported about 8.2 million, a drop of about 2.8 million or 25 percent. Worship attendance, at one time over 4.3 million on an average Sunday, stood at about 3.5 million. Church school attendance fell from well over 3 million on an average Sunday to about 1.6 million.⁵

The problem was what to make of these statistics. For interpreters viewing the data through a framework of loss and decline, the figures were nothing short of disastrous. At the very least they indicated a diminished significance for mainstream Protestantism and perhaps even the demise of denominations as U.S. Protestants have known them.

One prominent explanatory metaphor for the denominational trend was sickness and the need to return to health. American Presbyterianism was thoroughly studied through a series of seven volumes of essays called The Presbyterian Presence. One of these volumes was even titled The Mainstream Protestant Decline. The summary volume, The Re-forming Tradition, made clear the assumptions of the primary editors and authors. We approached our subject as a study in pathology, they wrote, beginning with questions such as, What is going wrong? They went on to discuss their subject around metaphors of health and sickness, like analysts circling the body detailing the signs of aging and disease. Everything in recent Presbyterian history was framed by the perspective of decline.⁶

Statistics such as these are indicative of an illness, claimed the authors of a major United Methodist study.⁷ Another widely read book about the United Methodist need for church growth referred to the numbers as a hemorrhage in a chapter titled sick unto death.⁸

Such metaphors function primarily as rhetorical devices, of course; they indicate no actual analytic categories. The rhetoric of malaise can stir feelings of remorse and guilt; evidently it is intended to spur self-examination and new resolve to seek the right medicines and outlooks that will lead to recovery. Not many people are convicted and converted by it, but some interpreters apparently think it will work.

This is only one of many strategies for interpreting the data and stirring people to action. Among the others:

Loss of influence. United Methodist affiliation has been declining as a percentage of the U.S. population in recent years. As late as 1950 The Methodist Church (MC) and Evangelical United Brethren Church (EUBC) together comprised 6.4 percent of the American populace. Lately the United Methodist (1968 union of MC and EUBC) portion has fallen closer to 3.6 percent. Membership has not only failed to grow with the U.S. population, it also has experienced actual decline even in high-growth areas such as California or the east coast megalopolis from Boston to Washington.⁹

Therefore—this argument goes—United Methodism and other mainstream denominations are threatened with loss of influence in shaping their communities. Fewer business and civic leaders attend their churches. The cultural hegemony once enjoyed and exercised by mainstream Protestant churches, embodied in such practices as Sunday closing laws, the printing of a sermon or inspirational column by a prominent pastor in each Saturday’s newspaper, or free access to radio and television time, has dissipated. If the denominations want to regain their footing, they must exert their views more forcefully from the pulpits of growing local churches with access to public media. But that will require a more uniform definition and declaration of their doctrine and moral teaching.

Failure to be strict in discipline and evangelical in message. Ever since Dean Kelley’s argument in 1972 that so-called conservative churches were growing because of their strictness in doctrine and discipline, some United Methodists have interpreted the data of decline as evidence that United Methodists in general are indifferent about their beliefs, or do not really believe anything specific enough to attract and hold new members. For many advocates of this view, more evangelical preaching, clearer confessional statements of belief, and more expectations of membership—particularly a verbal commitment to Jesus Christ—would turn the denomination around.¹⁰

Assimilation into the culture. A related framework for understanding decline has been to argue that United Methodists have been too much assimilated into the wider American culture. Accepting the basic values of human rights movements, the free exercise of religion of the First Amendment, and faith in education, science, and technology, mainstream Protestants have lost their voice for speaking out against moral wrong. Churches opposed to legal abortion, acceptance of homosexuality, and teaching of evolution have filled the vacuum. One prominent book argued that the church is a colony, an island of one culture in the middle of another. Christians must live like resident aliens in their outpost, teaching their distinctive language and life-style to the next generation and being faithful to the truth and way of Jesus. The book was subtitled a provocative Christian assessment of culture and ministry for people who know that something is wrong.¹¹

A Broader View of Denominational Change

All of these interpretations first assume decline, not only in numbers of denominational members, but also in the vitality of the church and the place of the church in the culture. Each of them offers a rhetorical strategy for recovering from what appears (to them) to be a fatal course. They all belong to an interpretive framework of failure and loss—a rhetoric that something is wrong.

This framework obviously has limited what these observers were able to see in the data. There are a number of demographic and sociological factors that more clearly account for the numbers, help to reinterpret the past, and point toward the contours of an emerging church.

Population shifts and mobility. Methodism was wildly successful in the nineteenth-century U.S., following European settlers to the farthest reaches of new towns and crossroads, organizing congregations among Africans—slave or free—Native Americans, Hispanic and Asian people, and moving with the urban, mainly white middle class through its successive waves out from the city centers. At the end of the twentieth century the church still enjoys the legacy of that enormous accomplishment. About 35,000 United Methodist local churches serve the U.S. populace. Only 138 out of 3,141 counties in the U.S. lack a United Methodist church, a statistic matched only by Roman Catholicism.¹²

Yet many of these churches are located in areas of severe population loss or shift. Some rural counties have lost three-fourths of their population in fifteen years. The megachurches of the 1920s, built on prime sites along trolley lines in city neighborhoods and accommodating huge auditoriums, gymnasiums, and even bowling alleys, have seen their members migrate to the suburbs. American cities have burgeoned, spreading across the land, following the patterns of expressways that make towns sixty miles from a city center effectively part of the metropolis. Only in the last ten years have United Methodists begun to organize new congregations at a pace that is responsive to this metropolitan growth.

On a national scale, the old Methodist Episcopal (MEC) and EUB heartland stretching from Maryland and Pennsylvania across Ohio and into Iowa has found itself labeled the rustbelt. While both the states and the annual conferences in those states continue to drop slowly but steadily in numbers, the Sunbelt has witnessed stunning growth in metropolitan areas such as Atlanta and Houston as well as in entire states such as Florida. In 2002 101 of the 108 UM local churches of 3,000 or more members in the U.S. were located in the band of states from Virginia to Florida and across to Texas.¹³

These shifts, combined with the startling estimate that over one-fourth of the U.S. population changes residence in any given year, mark a severely dislocated society. Many residents of any metropolitan area are not natives and view themselves as transient. Long-term, committed church membership has traditionally been more typical of community natives or permanent residents. Church affiliation has become notoriously difficult even to count, much less to count on, as congregations plan their programs.

Generational change. The generation born in the fifteen years after World War II experienced some of the sharpest changes in the history of U.S. culture. While all the so-called revolutions in civil rights, sexuality, gender relations, social mores, and artistic expression had roots deep in previous generations, the baby boomers came of age just as those changes began to flourish. New cultural attitudes, combined with sharp divisions over the U.S. war in Vietnam, helped to foster a deep suspicion of institutions and associations earlier generations had taken for granted. Thus not only the established churches, but also fraternal organizations, civic clubs, and many other voluntary associations found themselves facing a generation with the least inclination to join of any in memory.¹⁴

As the boomers were heading into their thirties—the decade in which young adults have traditionally found their way back into churches—books, workshops, and videos on how to reach this institutionally less committed generation were springing up like weeds. But no sooner were they in print than another generation with still different social experiences and outlooks came to adulthood. Clearly the challenge for mainstream denominations is not simply to adapt to one generation, but to read the signs of the times and discern ways to enable diverse people of all ages to experience the riches of tradition that are these denominations’ greatest gifts.¹⁵

Education and birth rate. United Methodists of the nineteenth century were prolific college builders. They believed that educated Christians could be more effective leaders of a Christian civilization. What they did not seem so aware of was that the more higher education people pursue, the fewer children they tend to have. According to the most thorough and reliable studies of mainstream religious groups, the low birth rate accompanying higher levels of education is itself enough of a demographic factor to account for most contemporary membership decline. The boomers postponed children and have had smaller families. As the post-boom children of the 1960s—fewer in number already—have relatively few children themselves, the demographic pool from which mainstream Protestant churches have usually drawn their membership gets even smaller. The significant effect of birth rate in membership trends is confirmed by the recent slowing of the statistical decline, reflecting the time lag from the initial diminished birth rates in the early 1960s. Many UM annual conferences show stable or growing numbers, and the Episcopal Church is beginning to report modest growth.¹⁶

All of these factors are helpful in broadening the picture of mainstream membership and reducing the rhetorical temperature. As sociologist of religion Robert Wuthnow argued,

the present woes of the liberal mainstream denominations are more a matter of demographics (low birth rates), geographic mobility (especially among the young), and sunk costs (often in declining neighborhoods) than it is [sic] of anything basically wrong with their teachings. . . . The liberal churches should not abandon their views and become more like evangelicals . . . they should in fact provide an alternative to fundamentalism.¹⁷

Similarly, evangelical denominations should continue to offer an alternative to liberalism. No one should think that overheated rhetoric and polarization will do any more than induce a declining quality of discourse and discussion. The characteristic emphases of each way of thinking are essential to the balance and well-being of the church, especially in a denomination like United Methodism that encompasses many varieties of people and viewpoints.

In the same vein, David Roozen and Carl Dudley responded to a Newsweek article hinting that mainstream Protestantism was headed for a dead end. Roozen and Dudley pointed out that mainstream Protestant membership is still large, that a high percentage of members show long-term commitment, that at least two-thirds of their congregations are stable or growing, and that these churches collectively raise billions of dollars a year in charitable giving. The United Methodist share alone is over 5.2 billion dollars annually.¹⁸

The authors went on to criticize commentators for not distinguishing between denominational reform and congregational vitality. The older denominations have an enormous overhead to carry from their previous institutional successes. That this has become a burden to be reorganized or reshaped in some way should not distract attention from the vitality of ministry and mission in local church congregations. Nor should struggles over denominational structure be interpreted to mean that congregations no longer want or need their connection through denominations.

As for the fear that mainstream Protestantism has lost its influence in society, James D. Davidson’s research on religious affiliations of persons listed in Who’s Who showed that mainstream Protestants continue to hold prominent leadership roles in all American institutions, far out of proportion to their numbers in the population. The question then would be what kind of witness the churches hope their laity will make in such positions of influence.¹⁹

Here the prevalent theology of diversity and inclusiveness practiced by mainstream denominations comes into play. A plurality of ethnicity, social status, political views, and theological stances can be, in Roozen and Dudley’s words, organizationally unsettling. All national—much less international—organizations that hope to encompass a diversity of peoples face this enormous challenge of maintaining a coherent structure and program.

The white leaders of denominations—people of predominantly northern European background—have too often confused their sense of normativity and self-assurance with what they think of as the identity or center of the church. As the participation of Christians of many cultures increases, denominational identity does indeed become more diffuse. But is this to be viewed as a loss, or as a gain that vastly enriches the church’s witness? Do current developments represent a decline from an imagined past in which the world was simpler, or are they not the fruit of the effectiveness of evangelism and mission over the last two centuries?

Outlines of a New Church

There is a startling difference between viewing recent church history through a paradigm of illness, decline, and fragmentation, and seeing it as a story of an emerging church encompassing many cultural ways and becoming a global communion. The lines of development that have brought mainstream Protestantism to this point run deeply through its history.

Wesleyan Methodism has always been by nature a movement bursting with activism and energy for mission. It has touched people of many cultures, many economic and social locations. A paradigm of flourishing new forms of church is far more suited to understanding the emerging contours of a United Methodist Church (UMC) of the future, contours that a paradigm of loss filters out as insignificant.

An international church. Nineteenth-century Methodist, Evangelical, and United Brethren bodies were missionary in character. They viewed themselves as part of a sweeping movement that would bring Christianity to all Americans and ultimately to the whole world through the evangelization of the world in this generation (circa 1900, that is). They planted churches in many countries, built hospitals, and supported schools in which were educated many of the new leaders of modernizing societies.

These newly trained leaders eventually argued for national independence from colonialism and for self-determination as churches. Some of these churches have become autonomous from United Methodism; some have maintained their denominational affiliation. Many have flourished under indigenous leadership, enjoying remarkable growth in recent years.

Even without the numbers for autonomous Methodist churches, United Methodist membership in central conferences (non-U.S. regional conferences) alone now comes to about 1.9 million, a nearly threefold gain in recent decades. This figure represents over 18 percent of the denominational total of 10.1 million. Why this is not the whole picture regularly reported and discussed in denominational bodies, instead of the U.S. figures alone, indicates the endurance of the loss paradigm and its U.S. preoccupations.

A multiethnic church. Not only from an international perspective, but also within the U.S., United Methodism continues to encompass many distinct ethnic and cultural groups. As the U.S. continues to add significantly more Hispanic, Asian, and other people to its predominant population of European and African heritage, the churches will be challenged to respond by founding even more diverse congregations and raising up leaders from within various ethnic groups.

Current data do not show much membership growth among nonwhite ethnic groups in U.S. United Methodism. However, data on ethnicity has only recently been collected and so far is not very reliable.²⁰ In any case, many annual conferences recognize a significant need for expansion of their work among new immigrant groups. Denominational programs such as an emphasis on the Ethnic Minority Local Church or Hispanic or Native American initiatives have made a start on ministries that will come to fruition only over a sustained period of support and action. Meanwhile, many church facilities are hosting congregations of first and second generation immigrants from regions such as Korea, the Pacific Islands, Central America, the Philippines, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa.

A church in ministry with the poor. Wesleyan Methodism has a long history of passionate concern for the poor. One of John Wesley’s definitions of doing good in the General Rules was a paraphrase of Matthew 25: giving food to the hungry . . . clothing the naked . . . visiting or helping them that are sick or in prison. The Methodist, Evangelical, and United Brethren churches carried out this mandate in ministries that gradually became institutionalized in schools, hospitals, and many other services.

Today the challenge of the church’s witness with the poor is even more pressing. Few United Methodist congregations in the U.S. include poor persons within their membership. Yet with much of the world’s population going hungry each day, and with persistent and growing poverty and unemployment in Western societies, churches have responded with new efforts in feeding the homeless, building affordable houses, and sending mission teams of skilled laity into crisis areas. Moreover, many annual conferences are seeking to identify leaders from within poor communities to organize congregations that can be catalysts for health and stability.

A church of historic resilience. Given the astounding global social changes of the fifty years since World War II, the endurance of mainstream traditions is nothing short of amazing. Hundreds of mainstream congregations are still going strong after 150 or more years of ministry in their place. Older city churches continue to find new forms of ministry even as the landscape of urban life around them has been drastically altered. Many small town congregations have come through the enormous economic transitions of their communities with steady membership and expanded mission. While the total numbers of members in the U.S. have continued to go down, only a small percentage of local churches—mainly in rural areas—have been closed in the last decade.

Unquestionably congregations face difficulties. They gather in all the distractedness and confusion of American culture, contend with social prejudices, compete with television and computer games for people’s attention and passions, and suffer with their communities from bouts of economic recession. But they endure, and not just on their own, but as bodies within historic denominations that at the very least provide them their pastors, many of their mission opportunities, and much fellowship in the work.

A distinctive ecclesiology. As later chapters will make clear, United Methodism has a form of organization that distinguishes it from any other church as well as from other kinds of associations such as civic government or business corporations. Among many notable features, the UMC is structured first and foremost for mission. By tradition and polity it is set up to invite people to Christian faith and life, to provide them the disciplines of Christian discipleship, and to send them into their communities as catalysts of a loving and just society. United Methodist clergy itinerate as missionaries in local places, and local churches are organized as mission outposts.

United Methodists make decisions in conference. The church has no single presiding bishop, no chief executive officer, and no executive committee. United Methodist bishops have great influence and hold the power to appoint clergy, but they are not elected by annual conferences. They are responsible not just for the annual conference(s) in which they preside, but for the whole church.

In all these ways United Methodist connectionalism is distinctive. It is the denomination’s unique contribution to the church catholic. In its Constitution and its practices, United Methodism expresses itself as a movement within the ecumenical church ad interim on the way to helping form a new church that is truly catholic, truly evangelical, truly reformed.

A Connection of Vital Congregations

Many denominational programs and campaigns in recent years have called for re-vitalization of churches. The last congregation of which I was pastor, located in an older, racially balanced, in-town suburb of St. Louis, was considered ripe for re-vitalization, and I used the term quite a bit myself.

I used it, that is, until the day I decided to clean out the cabinets in the pastor’s study and found the box of old photos. There was a picture of Bob Baker with the Men’s Bible Class of the 1950s, the wooden chairs all in rows, the podium on a little platform in front, Bob in his bow tie and suit. Here was the Youth Choir, over sixty strong, freshly scrubbed kids, the girls with collar length page-boys, the guys with buzz cuts—not a hair over the ear. And here was a clipping from the society page of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch detailing a 1950s Christmas Tea of the Women’s Society of Christian Service, complete with silver tea sets, china cups, linen cloths, and corsages for the servers. And everyone in every picture was white.

The prefix re means again or back, suggesting a re-turn, going back to something, getting things back the way they were, having life (vitality) again—presupposing that there once was indeed life. But I could not imagine my church ever re-capturing the kind of vitality found in the photo box. The community was multiracial now; few women had time or inclination to pour tea. The vitality reflected there may have been right for its time, but it would never be adequate for these times.

Nor could I imagine United Methodism as a whole ever going back to the forms of vitality of times past. Among other things, the older vitality included all-male clergy and lay leadership; it was marked by segregation of black and white churches, and an endemic paternalism of Western Christians toward the rest of the world. Surely this is not a vitality which the UMC must re-vive.

Instead anyone who wishes to get a glimpse of United Methodism tomorrow must look for the signs of life springing up in local churches and activities around the globe. Contrary to the rhetoric of crisis, the emerging vitality of the church today has been developing for a long time. The flourishing of a more hands-on ministry style in congregations is the outgrowth of decades of teaching about the ministry of the laity in each place. The phenomenal spread of Bible studies is the vine that has been nurtured by generations of scholars, pastors, and laity working for a more conscious place for scripture in liturgy, preaching, and church ministries.

In 1990 the United Methodist bishops issued a foundation document on Vital Congregations—Faithful Disciples. I was privileged—and deeply challenged—to have the responsibility of drafting this book. It began with a statement that sounds in retrospect like it belongs to the crisis mentality.

We, the people of God called United Methodist, have come to a critical turning point in our history. The world in which our heritage of faith seemed secure is passing away. We must choose now to follow the call of Jesus Christ into a new era. . . . The obvious decline in membership of many of our congregations troubles us. We feel burdened by the increasing financial load our congregations are carrying.

The point of this initial recitation, however, was to invite United Methodist congregations to consider the signs of vitality in their own life and mission.

The realization is dawning among us that we must be more intentional about being the church God calls us to be. . . . A deep spiritual hunger is awakening our congregations. . . . The Spirit is calling us, in all our congregations, to a time of discernment.²¹

The book went on to invite congregations to tell their stories, to share their experiences of their life of worship and service together, and to consider how their stories expressed the greater story of God’s mission in the world. Many of these stories were actually printed in the book as a kind of commentary on the ecclesiological text.²²

The whole document was arranged in a pattern of worship, partly because praise of God is the central act of the church, and partly because worship is the form through which Christians seek to discern God’s leading. Thus after the movements from gathering to praise to confession to pardon to hearing the word, congregations were invited as an offering of response to discern the signs of life in Christ in their own work. This was no mere group exercise, but deeply significant, for a new imagination for tomorrow’s church will arise by God’s grace from the creativity and vitality of congregations who find their life in Christ.²³

The method of this book was itself an ecclesiological statement of critical importance to how United Methodists should understand their polity. Rather than issuing a document as the chief executives of the denomination telling local churches what vitality is and mandating ten steps that every congregation must take—with accompanying reports to the district office—the bishops invited United Methodists to join them in a disciplined journey of discovery. Rather than talking about congregations, the episcopal leaders of the church asked them to contribute what they knew and experienced in each place of ministry.

Many local churches did not seem to know how to handle such a process. They did not believe their story was really of profound interest to anyone else. Others reacted with surprise and excitement. As one response put it, Thank you for including the laypeople, for turning the process the other way around.²⁴ Many people simply stated that this was the first time anyone representing the denomination had asked them to tell their story.

United Methodists are inveterate keepers of statistics. From the beginning of Methodism as a society in England, John Wesley continually remarked on numbers of hearers and members in all his meetings. Questions about What numbers are in Society? have always been significant to Methodist conferences as they weighed the effectiveness of their work.²⁵

But statistics can also become demonic institutionally when they are the sole means for local churches to communicate their ministry and mission. The yearly meeting of United Methodist charges presided over by the district superintendent, called the charge conference, requires reports that are compiled into a journal for the whole annual conference. As a result United Methodism has a remarkable historical record of membership and money for every local church and for districts, conferences, jurisdictions, and the church as a whole. In the computer age this data is a dream, making for no end of charts, graphs, and spreadsheets.

These reports provide no means, however, for congregations to tell anything about the life experience of which numbers are only the merest—and least adequate—expression. Most people would fill in their personal demographic data on a survey with some reluctance, and resent being packaged and labeled in numerical categories. But in its recent crisis and survival mentality the UMC has increasingly grabbed hold of statistical abstraction to categorize what is happening in local churches.

This, too, is very much an issue of power since numbers can be manipulated for many institutional and rhetorical purposes. Denying people the opportunity to tell their story is disempowering and immobilizing. Numbers without the narratives of the real people so inadequately represented in them are a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal (or clanging symbol, as I hear Paul’s words).²⁶ They cannot communicate the love and compassion, the conflict and struggle, the fears and hopes of trying to be a Christian community in today’s world.

A deep restlessness about these institutional patterns is sweeping through the church today. The 1994 report of the General Council on Ministries summarizing views of annual conference leaders put forward as its first conclusion:

The local church congregation is the primary base for ministry and mission and the foundation of everything that happens in the church.²⁷

The primary question that follows from this claim is how the connection can empower local churches for ministry. District superintendents are trying